Two nights ago, at midnight I had one of my flyby thoughts. They usually appear when something is troubling me just below the surface of consciousness. I was remembering an ongoing war I had with my dad over trees, shrubs, and animals. I loved them, he wanted to subjugate or eliminate them. Of course, I responded instinctively because before they are tamed, children fall under the same classification.
From Dad’s Conservative Baptist viewpoint, earth was a war-zone between nature, including human nature and God. We offended God because of our weak character and wrong headedness. Given free will, we followed the law of attraction and Satan offered a delicious, exciting presentation of something appealing beyond the same old, same old walk in the park even if the park was the Garden of Eden.
Dad and I had a complicated relationship. I was a menace because I was always bringing up something that bothered him greatly. He thought if he could get me straightened out and reigned in, maybe the irritants would quit popping up. Of course, it wasn’t really about trees and shrubs, or a bit later, the four-legged beings, I loved, especially cats. It was about hammering misfitting pieces in the puzzle of life into the intended place with a sledgehammer. The very authority of God and the order of the universe was at stake. He had deliberately hardened his heart and mechanized his mind so that nature would stay in its appropriate place as a slave.
Dad believed children were like nature and therefore not yet enslaved to the invisible boss that was always watching us and had spies everywhere. Children, with their urges, curiosity and questions could get everyone dammed to hell. The Big Boss had already decided not to allow ungrateful and treacherous humans back into the beautiful Garden of Eden. The punishment to the parents as well as the child would be even worse if the child managed to crawl in under the fence.
mom believed this stuff too, but she counted on her naïve helplessness to save her. Surely God would recognize that any rules she broke would be the result of innocent ignorance not any desire to rebel. Besides she was in constant fear and pain and that suffering had to compensate and knock off some negative points. She walked through the darkness with the wide unfocused eyes of a newborn deer, counting on the kindness of strangers. The strangers were often unkind however, and she had a “nervous breakdown,” that lasted for years.
I studied astrology for years but discovered the nature of people told me more about the cosmic actors than the cosmic actors told me about people. For some reason it always worked backward in my mind. Dad was a Scorpio and thus ruled by the planet Pluto, named after the God of the Underworld. Scorpio doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and he doesn’t pull punches. His children expect the same from the supreme boss. They are tough and can eat rotten steak and drink vinegar. The degradation of matter seems to fascinate them. They can take it straight about the final fate of every living being, and they aren’t escapists.
Hard as I tried to believe this view of reality, I couldn’t accept it with resignation and hope that because I was a baptized Christian I would go to heaven. Just because heaven was only somewhat better than hell, it wasn’t any place I would want to live in for eternity. As I got older, I had terrible nightmares, of the second coming of Jesus. The story was that Jesus would one day appear on a cloud and draw all his followers to heaven before the unbelieving world was sent to hell. I didn’t want to go to either place, but I had to keep it a secret. I had many nightmares about Jesus unexpectedly appearing on a storm cloud surrounded by lightning bolts. His arms were outstretched, and this was it! On one of these last nightmare ascensions, I fought so hard to stay on earth that I was literally turned inside out. So began my descension into an entirely different reality. Now I see this incredibly painful flaying as the actual beginning of a rebirth, although it took many years to understand this, I really was born again and it began a process of being born, again, and again, and again. I’ve lost many skins. I now see this 3-D space/time planet as the place where we prepare for ascension to a higher state of being. Probably there are many other dimensional iterations of this planet that exist simultaneously, I sense that this is so, although I can't get too precise about the way this would manifest.
Of course, the Jesus story has masqueraded as literal history, and heaven and hell presented as places below or above the earth realm, (how does that work on a globe where everything is both above and below depending on the time of day). Literal minded fundamentalist Christianity is the most anti-Christ teaching I can imagine. It attempts to freeze people at a gross literal interpretation of an ineffable transcendent state of being.
For many years I felt sorry for myself for being born into such a gross, hard world of angst, poverty, war, and loss. The most beautiful and talented of our kind seemed to be inevitable victims of hungry demons. Beauty, honesty, and love were always under attack. I’ll include curiosity among the forbidden. It is an aspect of love because it is propelled by attraction. Even cruelty and greed are disappointed, and disfigured forms of love.
It is the intelligence of the heart that functions as a love filter. I’ve come to believe that our future fate as humans and the fate of our neighbors on this planet (maybe some neighboring planets, as well) depends on recognizing that heart intelligence is crucial for putting perception in balance and remembering that the heart is the central energy chakra and physically pumps our life blood throughout our body. This is literally true, but also symbolically, and spiritually true. There is a good reason that the heart is traditionally represented by the Sun.
We modern humans need to recover a crucial ability at which the ancients surpassed us, of seeing truth on several levels or dimensions simultaneously. The physical is not just physical but is only one demonstration of multiple perceivable states that exist simultaneously. Being turned inside out by a false representation of Christ gathering his followers was right on, and became my rebirth to another reality.
Yes, when they confuse eternity with “everlasting time,” how can heaven "not" come across as an everlasting hell?! And how can the Second Coming "not" come across as nightmarish? And I truly empathize if your dad was a Scorpio. I wish you could have known my office partner back “in the day” in Denver. He was a “triple Scorpio” (he said) and “hated everyone” (he said). – which is how/why we got along so well (Taurus/Scorpio) - animated & entertaining (putting it mildly). – But as a father to a young daughter?? Scorpio to a Gemini – I just can't imagine. It must have been brutal.
ReplyDeleteChristianity twisted everything around so much, it's hard to know even where to begin (and end). Maybe one easy way to see the conflict is by juxtaposing the two axioms: Christianity saying we come “into this world,” pagans saying, “no,” we come “out of it.” That says it all, just about. From there they go in opposite directions about everything.
I lean with Hitchens anyway, that “religion poisons everything.” It's only when we get "past" religion that it becomes something authentic. Through seemingly endless muck grows a lotus flower.
As a writer (which you are), welcome back.